Feature # 4 - CORN CORN CORN

Remember when I was giving my little spiel about Fort Ancient culture?  I mentioned that they were largely a maize-based agricultural society, and you can definitely tell that from one of the features we excavated.  In this trench, we found about 9 or 10 different features, all containing different types of artifacts and organic materials.

I'm in the first feature, which was a lovely trash pit (midden, remember?).  The girl in the purple off to the right - you see her?  That is only a half of a feature that we decided to poke around in to see what it contained.  Little did we know that we were uncovering a gold mine of burnt corn.  Usually, we collect pieces of charcoal to use for dating.  However, this small feature was filled to the brim with pieces of corn.  When we find organic remains like this, we usually put them in a film vile because they seldom come in bulk.  With this unit, we needed BOXES to put all the corn in.  It was like corn with a side of dirt.  Anyway, sorry to rant - it was just extremely surprising to come across that much corn in one small feature.  What was nice about this collection of corn was that it was near the earth oven in the middle of the trench.  When we look at corn cooked by Fort Ancient Indians, we get a nice glimpse into how agriculture has transitioned over time from something small and without extensive techniques or fertilizers into overgrown feed for farm animals and a key ingredient in most foods.  

Here, you can see the size of corn centuries back as opposed to what we find in the fields of the Midwest today.  What I like about finding organic materials like this is that we are able to get a closer look at diet apart from mussels and forest animals.  In the feature, we also find other remains like shells of nuts and seeds, indicating at least some sort of variety in diet.  We get a first-hand feel for what life was like for these natives and relate to our experiences today.  We wonder how, like us, they may have experienced drought or poor soil or perhaps the opposite and feasted on their version of "gold."  Finding organic specimens like this is exciting for me because it allows us to have a different view of native life apart from the material objects like pottery and projectile points to appreciate and understand about past ways of life.